Yes, if they bring insights. Not merely facts or data.
Matt Levine, Farnam Street, James Clear - they add value in their own ways.
I dont read every issue though.
A philosophical approach may help. Change is the only constant expectation that I have. All of my past work over 25+ years is now deprecated, obsolete, tech-debt, or irrelevant. It is the nature of software. Intangible work built upon ephemeral stacks, all to go away with time. My personal metric: how much I can keep pace with. Rate of change vs deep-rooted expertise.
Had a torture filled 4 years in my undergraduate degree. Mostly poor grades throughout. But I aced the 2 internships as part of the degree program. Several profs told me that had the university believed in absolute marking versus relative, I would have been booted out in the third year itself.
I can solve real world problems, but cant understand theory and textbooks beyond a point. Definitely struggle with closed scope problems in exams.
I learnt to code - started with frontend development, which was easier back then. Basically, find something in software that you can excel at, with ease, within months.
Resilience beats academic excellence in the real world of solving typical problems and earning a decent living.
The idea of leaving behind a lasting legacy of work is vanity squared. The ones who do selfless work for open-source do not necessarily do it for a place in history. The point of choosing a purely materialistic software career was to have the ego humbling of watching one's work get decimated or trivialized in due course.
Nice tips, but context specific. In my observation and experience, no rules apply when power dynamics and culture specific nuances are in play.
Examples: A setting where the group has pre-decided to exclude you - think snooty neighbourhoods. Pre-conceived biases cant be overcome.
An unruly boss who bulldozes and dominates. A cool crowd that stigmatizes the nerds. Or cultures where fragile masculinity hinges upon dominating at all costs and multiple folks speaking over each other.
Also: these rules are hard to remember and apply in rapid conversation, for folks who are borderline autistic.
Greybeard with 26 years in the industry. Sorted in decreasing order of impact:
[1] Back in 2006, created a web scraper with .Net framework and C# that helped my wife run a home-based scraping business for 2 years. There were no tools / libraries / frameworks for spidering / scraping back then - or at least I wasnt aware of them. Helped her have a replacement income since she had quit her job for maternity. She of course enhanced it and made it better. Was fun while we were the early ones in it.
[2] SAP's Community Network in 2002: Supports a million users today, started with a much smaller user base of 10k, implemented it from scratch as a Java MVC web-app with another colleague.
[3] Amazon Ads in 2015: Contextual commerce ads in review websites and blogs, this single product drove (and still continues to drive) multi-hundred million dollars in incremental revenue for AMZN every year. HN doesnt like the Advertising business, but hey.
Am one of the black sheep of my Electrical Engineering batch who moved to software. Why? The steep learning curve that involved loads of memorization of long formulae and static values which sucked for someone like me.
An easier, and more forgiving entry path based on self-learning ("hack my way through") in software development as compared to the entry barriers of EE - especially in India where Oscilloscopes and other equipment were crazy expensive some decades ago.
20% of my batch has moved to software over the last 25 years, compensation being one key factor.
1995 India - Had a paid internship (Rs 2500 per month or ~ USD 80 back then) with a small software company that worked on FoxPro + dBase. A very diverse team (gender ratio), the highly enthusiastic bunch created software for non-banking financial companies.
A thick documentation book occupied most of the space in the large, laminated box that such development software came in. Along with half a dozen floppy disks where we hoped that no disk would have a bad sector.
Requirements were constantly over the phone from clients and shipping software meant taking two sets of floppy disks of different brands (backup!), in-person, to the city where the client was.
CRTs needed a warm-up time and we had a small diesel generator (hand cranked) to power up the x86 computers once the main power line crashed (which was frequent).
No internet searches, no help other than that thick paper manual or waiting around for hours for a senior engineer to get free to help you out.
College taught us C and Pascal on Unix.
That seems so far away from the world of microservices and SPAs.
</nostalgia>
Mid-2001 - the dot-com I worked for folded. Switched to an enterprise (B2B) company that wanted to bring their legacy systems to the web. Win-win. Pay was conservative but the stability was what I needed then.
One cant do much. I have had a couple of terrible experiences. Its amazing what power does to some technical managers and senior HR. Its their karma and they are going in the right direction of being assholes who will have a miserable old age once the power is gone.
- Product Market Fit - find that before continuing to perfect the product.
- Market size and especially addressable market size. We learnt it the hard way with children's apps.
- Tech is a tool. Unless you are doing groundbreaking research, dont be in awe of the tools (tech), nor let it go crazy expensive.
- One needs a deep reserve of patience and strength, you will get challenged in all dimensions.
- Sometimes you can do everything right, and still fail.
- Minimal sugar or sweet stuff. 5 grams sugar a day, max.
- 250 grams to 350 grams of food per major meal.
- Lots of water through the day
- Small, healthy snacks of 50 to 100 grams, twice a day.
Mobile apps startup almost a decade ago, for 2 years. Failed. Joined a FAANG company, initial months were depressing - narrow scope, cog in the wheel, shoddy culture.
On the plus side, the interviews were a breeze due to the depth I had built up on the tech side in my startup, and I had instant street-cred every time I talked to new coworkers.
Experience as a founder was very valuable due to the much bigger picture that I could see most of the time and easily switch my thinking hats from tech to product to business, and add value to most discussions, even with executives.
New hires across roles and seniority levels jump ship after a month, since offers just keep pouring in. Very hard to hire DevOps folks. Roadmaps are heavier than ever and fewer folks to haul them.
a) Their work load - whether they will burn out or become a lazy bum. Neither extreme is good.
b) What the next job level entails and how to get there. Whether to take the career path of being an individual contributor, manager, architect, tech-lead manager, etc.
c) Compensation, equity, and how RSUs, ESOPs, etc. work.
d) Alternate, overlapping fields of work - in case of software developers, how can they explore product management or running tech programs.